As we head into fall, pumpkin spice lattes and pumpkin spice candles and downtown girl aesthetic and cute boots and shoegaze indie and the Sundays come back to haunt us. We love it. We will all undergo the collective crisp satisfaction, the Halloweekend anticipation, the uniquely orange-brown air that is fall.
And with September and October, a decades-old show will also resurface. Rory-holding-a-cup-of-coffee style inspo will be everywhere on TikTok with PinkPantheress in the background, and your closest friends—possibly even you—will start over from season one.
And I’ll call my mom and tell her everyone is watching it again, and she will laugh and say she loves that, and I just won’t understand, because I hate Gilmore Girls.
Not just the show; I think the girls themselves are insufferable too. Don’t get me wrong, I used to love them when I was 14 and wrapped up in being a precocious little saint like Rory was. But when I watch it now, some moments from these mother-daughter duos get under my skin.
Before I hop into an analysis of an episode, here is a list of uncategorized gripes I have with Gilmore Girls:
- Out-of-place Israel propaganda (look this one up).
- It was cute and witty in the first few seasons, and the drama cranked up to soap-opera levels in later seasons instead of ending the show.
- Luke is boring.
- Rory’s banter with Jess, to me, is annoying but this is debatable.
- Mother Lorelai and daughter Rory unrealistically only eat cheeseburgers but are super skinny, then make fun of people who eat healthy food.
- The constant dated references are not that entertaining to me; it feels like a less funny Family Guy cutaway.
- The younger Gilmores frame having trust fund grandparents entirely as a bad thing, which comes off super privileged. Yes, Emily Gilmore is wholly unlikable, but Lorelai gets Rory’s private school tuition paid for by having one dinner with Emily per week and acts like this is pure torture.
- Speaking of Emily, she and Lorelai don’t talk like real people. I understand that this is a show, and the quick-witted banter is one of its main appealing factors. I just think it doesn’t work between two people who supposedly dislike each other so much. Please, if you pretend that you talk like this with someone you hate, you’re lying.
Case Study
To make sure I was remembering correctly, I watched a random episode of the show and only found more ammunition.
First, Rory is a self-centered friend and acts like a toddler. In this installment, Rory cannot find anywhere to study for a very hard, important class for the first year of her Journalism major at Yale.
She tries to study in her room that she shares with Paris but Paris is having some relationship drama with her boyfriend on the phone, so instead of being supportive to her friend, Rory moans and groans that it’s too loud and she can’t study.
Then Rory picks up the call from Paris’ boyfriend (that Paris had been avoiding) to tell him how annoyed she is that he’s calling. Wow, Rory. What a friend you are.
The other more rational characters point out that she can study anywhere in any of the libraries on Yale’s campus. Really, Rory? There’s nowhere to study at YALE?
But these libraries don’t have that quirky BS that Rory likes and are “too quiet,” so she instead finds a lousy, knotted, gnarled tree to sit on its uncomfortable roots and write on her notebook in her lap while holding a book open with the other hand.
Then, her (in my opinion, reprehensible) crime: on another day, a clueless youth sits under that same tree thinking things are sweet and becomes the target of Rory’s wide-eyed wrath. She complains in her baby voice, “You’re sitting under my tree,” about a tree on a university campus.
She asks if he could please leave with his trucker magazine. So now not only does Rory feel entitled to a tree that’s not hers, but she’s elitist and thinks her first year of her journalism major might be the hardest thing anyone has ever done in the world.
Coming to my next point; Rory is not that smart. She got into Yale off of her legacy alumni status that the family pretends to detest and she paid a guy $20 so she could sit under a tree. There’s a hundred other trees.
Folks treated her like she was Miss Mensa and maybe that’s why she dropped out of college—because she never got a chance to actually live up to those standards.
Maybe my problem with this show is really that Rory believes everything revolves around her, and we as the audience are supposed to indulge this. It’s not a Holden Caulfield situation where we can both sympathize with and abhor him, but she is our precious teenager who we must root for.
To be fair, she has character development at the end of that episode and apologizes, but she reverts back to a brat after every episode ends.
Anyway, hate-watching that episode reminded me of when my mom and I used to lie around on the couch on rainy days when I was 14. And really, how much better am I than Rory here? BRB, going to binge-watch the rest.